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“Billionaireism,” as defined by the writer and internet critic Cory Doctorow, describes “both the pathology that affects you when you are so wealthy that you’re effectively above consequences and above moral consideration for others, and the pathologies that having a society dominated by such people inflicts on the rest of us.” (One such pathology is the rapid decline in quality of digital platforms which Doctorow has termed “enshittification,” and which was the subject of a book he published last year.) A while ago, Doctorow joined us to talk about some books that illuminate different facets of living in a highly unequal society where the richest measure their wealth in billions. His remarks have been edited and condensed.

Careless People

by Sarah Wynn-Williams

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This is an extraordinary book by a woman who served as a government-relations executive at Facebook, working directly under Sheryl Sandberg, Joel Kaplan, and Mark Zuckerberg—the company’s three big beasts. Wynn-Williams enters her role very enthusiastic about Facebook’s possibilities, but she soon becomes disenchanted. Many of those reasons are obvious, but there is also a lot in this book that has not previously been revealed. She describes instances of horrible sexual harassment and personal cruelty, like when, in a performance review, she was chastised for being “unresponsive” during a period when she was in a coma.

The ways in which the people Wynn-Williams worked with are shown to be “careless” evolve throughout the book. At the beginning, they seem more like people who unthinkingly flick cigarette butts out of the window when it’s been a dry summer. They’re careless in a reckless way. But, by the end, when Facebook has become structurally important to many governments—and much of the book is about how Kaplan sets out to accomplish this, in part through embedding with the Trump campaign—her co-workers become careless in the sense of just not giving a fuck about social duties or morality. It’s a Leona Helmsley, “Taxes are for the little people” variety of carelessness.

Little Bosses Everywhere

by Bridget Read

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This is a book about the history of pyramid schemes, and specifically about a form of pyramid scheme known as “multi-level marketing,” or M.L.M. In the schemes, people are recruited to become salespeople for companies that sell their products directly to consumers, and then, when they fail to sell—because the products are not very good—the salespeople buy the inventory themselves to meet quotas. The M.L.M. world is also filled with people offering seminars on how to sell, preying on people who have already been scammed.

The connection between this stuff and billionaireism is that, first of all, the people at the top are very rich. They make a lot of money by basically lying about how they make money. And, second of all, the institutional support for policies that make billionaireism possible was in many ways created and financed by the M.L.M. industry. The Heritage Foundation, which laid the groundwork for so many laws that help make oligarchy possible, was bankrolled by Jay Van Andel and Rich DeVos (Betsy DeVos’s father-in-law), the founders of Amway—a consumer packaged-goods M.L.M. company—when Amway was on the verge of being crushed by F.T.C. regulations. Read’s book is a great explanatory account of the industry, connecting big, nebulous ideas like neoliberalism to actual concrete things.

More Everything Forever

by Adam Becker

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Becker, who has a Ph.D. in astrophysics, is a wonderful science communicator. This book repudiates the nonsense that we hear from people suffering from what we might call terminal billionaireism, about things that we can do with computers and rocket ships that are—if you know anything about the subjects—really dumb. He runs through a gamut of billionaire beliefs, from the colonization of Mars to uploading human minds into computers to A.I. waking up and turning us all into paper clips. He devastates a lot of the foundations for these arguments—the problem with the Mars idea, for example, is that there’s no magnetic field around its atmosphere, the soil is poisonous, and, ultimately, even if you were to detonate every nuclear bomb on Earth, this would still be a better place for us to live. He also shows how self-serving these ideas are. Elon Musk’s boosterism about Mars was part and parcel of him getting hundreds of millions of dollars from the U.S. government in space contracts.

This is less heavy than the other books—it’s definitely popular science. But it’s popular science with teeth. Becker interviews people from other disciplines—mathematicians, neuroscientists—and the result is a book that does a great job of showing how deluded, stupid, or in bad faith many of these billionaires’ claims are, and of providing a powerful antidote to hype. As Becker points out, a lot of these futurist ideas supported by billionaires—space travel, unfettered A.I. development, carbon sequestration, and the like—they’re just ways to get around decarbonization, and to avoid having to put together a muscular climate agenda where states intervene in markets to prevent them from rendering the only planet capable of sustaining human life in the known universe uninhabitable.

In 2016, the D.C. newspaper The Hill crowned Eric Swalwell, a Democrat from California, the “Snapchat king of Congress.” Not only was he adept at using the app—which allows users to share ephemeral photos—to communicate directly with his constituents, but Swalwell had also set himself up as a tutor, of sorts, to his colleagues. (“I tell the members, just trust me,” he said. “In a year, we’re all going to be there anyway.”) Snapchat would, in fact, be superseded as the political-comms fad du jour, but Democratic hand-wringing about the Party’s visibility in a fragmented attention economy has never gone out of style, and Swalwell has often been seen as an exemplar of how to be everywhere, all at once. (Even before he became the Snapchat king, he inspired the Twitter trend Swalwelling, or the practice of photographing your feet as you step onto a plane.) Last November, when Swalwell entered the race for governor of California, Politico wrote that his candidacy would test the power of a “national profile constructed through cable news hits, Trump bashing and social media saturation.” He has since posted TikToks channelling an array of memes: playing “six seven” with his daughter, lip-synching to Lady Gaga’s “Telephone,” doing the “Beez in the Trap” routine with a teen-age content creator. Last week, the Times reported on Democrats’ burgeoning use of the F-word on X, and found Swalwell to be a prolific adopter.

Shortly before that story appeared, Swalwell felt compelled to respond to a less welcome form of online attention: a growing drumbeat of rumors that he had behaved inappropriately with women, including members of his staff. Swalwell’s campaign—which claimed that the accusations were being pushed by rivals working hand in glove with “MAGA conspiracy theorists”—clearly viewed staying silent as untenable. “We know how the new media ecosystem works,” one adviser said. “We know how misinformation spreads.” Some of the posts hinted at forthcoming news coverage, the prospect of which apparently spooked donors and supporters, and on Friday, the San Francisco Chronicle and CNN published stories on allegations of sexual misconduct made by a total of four women, one of whom said that Swalwell had raped her. Swalwell reportedly sent the women graphic messages and images via Snapchat. “There was Eric the Snapchatting guy,” a former employee of Swalwell’s told CNN, “and then there was Eric my boss.”

In a video posted to Instagram, Swalwell admitted to errors of judgment but called the claims of sexual assault “flat false” and promised to “fight them with everything that I have.” On Sunday, however, he suspended his gubernatorial campaign; the following day, amid speculation that he might imminently face a vote on his expulsion from Congress, he said that he would give up his House seat, too. On Tuesday, another woman came forward with a rape allegation. Soon afterward, his resignation took effect. (He continues to deny the reports of misconduct and assault.)

In some ways, this miserable tale is as old as time. In others, it looks like a parable of our modern media environment, with its cacophony of voices, old and new, all clamoring for attention. If Swalwell lived by this clamor—making himself heard everywhere, from CNN to buzzy podcasts—his career now appears to have died by it, too. (Not that we should yet rule out Swalwell one day trying to start a podcast of his own.) It’s often said that the new voices in this ecosystem are rendering the old irrelevant, and it’s certainly true that legacy media is in secular decline. I’ve long thought, however, that the relationship is symbiotic: the old guard increasingly needs the new to draw eyeballs to its reporting, and the new needs to talk about said reporting since it doesn’t do much laborious fact-gathering of its own. When it comes to the Swalwell story, this dynamic seems to have become particularly intertwined.

According to a detailed time line published by Politico, that story began when Arielle Fodor, an education content creator known as Mrs. Frazzled, posted positively about Swalwell’s nascent gubernatorial bid, only for several people to reach out, alleging, among other things, that he had slept with an intern. Fodor and another prominent online personality, Cheyenne Hunt, a former Democratic congressional candidate, took the lead in posting about the rumors that Swalwell eventually responded to. At the same time, behind the scenes, they brought together his accusers and steered them in the direction of CNN, which had the institutional heft—and, most important, high-powered media lawyers—that they lacked. (Hunt told Politico that her and Fodor’s crusade should not be seen as “a green light to creators who think that they should be breaking sensitive news.”)

In the end, it took a time-honored brand of journalism to actually bring Swalwell down, even if influencers rolled the pitch. Viewed narrowly, the latter’s role might even be seen as a version of the reporter-source relationship. But that isn’t quite right, either. As Hunt has put it, she and Fodor developed the sort of “parasocial relationships that get built on social media”—itself a form of reporting—to win the trust of Swalwell’s alleged victims. And, as Politico noted, political operatives have been left wondering whether their initial online salvos against Swalwell reflect a “new normal.” Already, political campaigns had been navigating their own awkward symbiosis—or, perhaps, a less reciprocated relationship—with content creators, courting them for their huge audiences (see again: “Beez in the Trap,” Swalwell, 2025) while remaining wary of their loose editorial standards and primary incentive to chase clout. Earlier this year, a TikToker in Texas claimed that James Talarico, a Democratic candidate for Senate, had privately described Colin Allred, an opponent who had dropped out of the primary, as a “mediocre Black man.” Talarico denied attacking Allred on the basis of race. He won his primary anyway, but not before the controversy blew up—both on social media and in the traditional mainstream press.

The modern attention economy, of course, has been blamed, including by me, for offering the scandal-plagued an out from critical scrutiny by allowing them to sidestep mainstream-media gatekeepers and make their case to a public that is atomized, polarized, and distracted. President Donald Trump is the foremost avatar of this trend: since the beginning of his political career, he has flooded old and new media alike with such a constant churn of outrage that typically career-ending infamies—including multiple claims of sexual assault (which he denies)—have more or less bounced off. But many big names have indeed been disgraced in the Trump era, despite their attempts to use the rhythms of the attention economy to rebound: Andrew Cuomo, after resigning as governor of New York, started a podcast, then ran for mayor; George Santos, the Republican congressman exposed as a serial liar, used his notoriety as a springboard to meme-ification. Cuomo’s podcast and mayoral bid flopped. Santos went to prison, even if Trump ultimately let him out. (You can still book him on Cameo.)

Swalwell’s downfall might even show that, if old-school journalism can still mete out consequences for bad behavior, new media can sometimes accelerate this process, rather than dilute it. Expulsions from the House are rare—there have only ever been six, the latest of which saw Santos kicked out, in 2023—but, as of the beginning of this week, it looked plausible that Swalwell would soon join their number, and that three other lawmakers might, too: the Democrat Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (accused of financial fraud) and the Republicans Tony Gonzales (sexual misconduct) and Cory Mills (both). Their expulsions were never guaranteed; two-thirds of their colleagues would have to consent, which is a high bar, and leaders in both parties reportedly remain leery of removing elected representatives without first affording rigorous due process. (Even the expulsion of Santos was controversial, since he hadn’t yet been convicted of a crime, but he had at least been put on blast by the House Committee on Ethics, which recently declared the guilt of Cherfilus-McCormick but wasn’t done weighing in on the other cases.) There was also an unseemly whiff of insider partisan horse-trading here—two Democrats for two Republicans—in a razor-close chamber. But the mere consideration of such extreme punishment seemed to reflect another dynamic of this moment, itself very much downstream of the modern media environment: an increasingly sulfurous anti-establishment energy, and the incentive for denizens of that establishment to be seen taking it seriously.

Cherfilus-McCormick and Mills have denied any wrongdoing, and appear safe—if only for this week. Gonzales said, on the same day as Swalwell, that he would resign. The seeds of Gonzales’s departure were sowed by a local paper, the San Antonio Express-News, which reported on an alleged sexual relationship with an aide who later died after setting herself on fire. (He was subsequently accused of inappropriate conduct toward a second employee.) Gonzales initially denied any affair; after texts surfaced disproving this and showing apparently coercive behavior, he went on “The Joe Pags Show,” a right-wing talk vehicle, and acknowledged a lapse in judgment, though he vehemently distanced himself from his aide’s death. “You cannot hate the media enough,” Gonzales said. “There’s a reason why I’m coming on your show. There’s a reason why I reached out to you, and this alternative way of getting real information out. This was all a very coördinated attack toward me.” This clapback didn’t work for Gonzales—even before announcing his resignation, he had dropped his reëlection bid. That left the G.O.P. lane open to Gonzales’s primary opponent, Brandon Herrera. He might be better known as the AK Guy, his moniker on YouTube, where he came to fame posting about guns. ♦

Since the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran, at the end of February, more than three thousand Iranians have died, and the global economy is now at risk of heading into a recession. But unlike in the United States, where the war has hurt President Trump’s political standing, the war remains popular in Israel. (Israel, following rocket fire from Hezbollah, has also invaded southern Lebanon; eighteen-hundred Lebanese have been killed.)

To better understand the state of public opinion in Israel, I recently spoke by phone with Dahlia Scheindlin. A polling expert, Scheindlin is a policy fellow at the Century Foundation, a columnist for Haaretz, and the author of “The Crooked Timber of Democracy in Israel.” During our conversation, which was edited for length and clarity, we discussed why Jewish Israelis are opposed to a ceasefire despite thinking the war is not going well, the complicated political calculations facing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and why so much of the Israeli public thinks military force is the only way to solve international problems.

How would you describe the way Israelis feel about the war with Iran?

There is great disappointment in the ceasefire. I think of myself as somebody who’s pretty in touch with Israeli public opinion, but even I was surprised to find out that only about a third of Israelis support the ceasefire. And that support is primarily driven by the Arab population, because the Jewish population is particularly against it. And this combines insights from a number of surveys. The reason that was really surprising to me is that everybody was living through what felt like a nightmare for almost six weeks of war. And it’s pretty much all anybody could think about. You can’t live under the constant threat of incoming ballistic-missile fire anywhere, at any time. You have to change everything: where you go, where you don’t go, schools closed, shops closed, theatres closed, no traffic on the roads because people don’t really go out. Some people’s homes were damaged, and some people lost their lives.

But what I think we saw in the surveys was a very strong conviction that the war had not succeeded in its aims, which frankly it doesn’t take a political analyst or expert to know, because Prime Minister Netanyahu had quite clearly stated the aims of the war, and they quite clearly were not achieved.

What aims are you referring to?

The Prime Minister was conveying rather clearly, even if not always explicitly, that he wanted the Iranian regime to collapse. And the aim of Israel’s military actions against Iran has always been to destroy its nuclear-weapons program, which the Prime Minister takes for granted, and to destroy its ballistic-missile capabilities. And there was often the goal of incapacitating Iran’s “axis of resistance”—what we often call its proxy network. He didn’t talk about the last one as much this time, but it’s sort of implicit in a lot of people’s minds because he had talked about it so much in the past, and because Hezbollah joined the war very quickly, probably at Iran’s request, which gave Israel the excuse it needed to unleash a much more severe assault against Hezbollah. None of these aims have been achieved.

Looking at a recent U.S. public opinion poll, I noticed that the ceasefire was popular while the war is not. I imagine many Americans would like the war to stop because they think it is failing. You seem to be saying that Israel has also not achieved its aims but that people want the war to continue at a similar or greater intensity. Is that accurate?

It’s as accurate as I can say. I haven’t had time to do focus groups and really find out what’s behind this. It’s a completely new situation. But the way I see it is that it is a bind for Netanyahu because we already saw that, after one month of the war, support for it was falling in Israel. It was still very high. Remember, the war started with practically a consensus among the Jewish population. The average level of support from the Israeli population over all was over eighty per cent because the Arab population supported it at much lower rates. But the Jewish population had a sweeping consensus of over ninety per cent support in the first two weeks.

But, by the end of a month, that support was declining. Even among Israeli Jews, it was below eighty per cent. And the over-all weighted average was only about two-thirds.

When you say weighted average, you mean the whole population, Jewish and Muslim and everyone else?

Yeah, I use those technical terms only because the Jewish and the Palestinian citizens of Israel are so different on this issue. If there were minor variations, I would just say “Israelis.”

So you’re saying that the popularity of the war is falling, perhaps as a reflection of the war not being successful, but at the same time, support is still pretty high and most people don’t want a ceasefire?

Exactly. That’s what I’m calling Netanyahu’s bind, because, on the one hand, he was losing support for the war, and it also was not reflecting well on him. Personally, he got no political boost—not him, not his party, not his government. There was a very, very slight lift for his party in the beginning, but not for his coalition. And then, by the fourth week, he wasn’t doing well.

Their solution was to at least continue the war because maybe it would achieve its goals. It is almost as if Israelis don’t think or know about any other option besides war for how to achieve political or strategic security aims, because there has been a complete delegitimation and undermining of diplomacy to the point where most Israelis don’t even think that it exists.

So, if you are Netanyahu, you are in a bind. If you’re just some other Israeli politician and you want to be a leader, you could try to transform that attitude by relegitimating diplomacy or some other vision, whatever it may be. But that would take leadership, that would take courage, that would take bold vision, that would take somebody who is willing to take political criticism for the sake of standing by his or her convictions. And, so far, we don’t have any political leaders who have suggested anything like an alternative path on Iran.

How is Netanyahu’s coalition polling in the upcoming election, and who are his main opponents likely to be?

The election is probably going to be in October. Ever since October 7th, there were expectations that it would be held early, that the government couldn’t survive, but the government did survive, and it basically lasted its term. It passed a budget a few weeks ago, and with the war in Iran, it was able to pause the one lingering toxic issue that might have collapsed the government, which had to do with drafting the ultra-Orthodox, who have a long-term exemption from Army service.

But what we have seen is that this government, by contrast to most elected governments, did not have a grace period. Within a few weeks of this particular coalition being formed in December, 2022, by mid-January, they had lost their majority in polls and never regained it. And, unlike most other countries in wartime that have been attacked, there was no rallying effect for the government after October 7th. In fact, there was an anti-rally. Support for the government plunged, as did support for Netanyahu and support for his party. But that started to change about six months later. And so, by mid-2024, the government was polling at the strength that it had before October 7th. So not great, not a majority, but it recovered the major hit that it took after October 7th, and that’s where it has stayed. And what’s remarkable is that almost nothing has happened to actually show any real upward trajectory for the government to get what it would need in terms of parliamentary seats in the next election.

I think the conventional wisdom, at least in the American press, is that the reason Netanyahu recovered a little bit of support in 2024 is that he had political success attacking regional adversaries, which actually may have made him think that attacking Iran would be popular. Is that your sense?

That is pretty much what I wrote at the time. And that’s what cemented his return. I think Israelis appreciate when they have a government that seems to take back the initiative on military and security-related things, and show the Middle East that it’s a strong country. There is a very widespread and extremely crude portrait of the Middle East as a place that only understands force. And, to survive in this metaphoric jungle, you have to show your strength. That’s the only way to live and survive, and to prove that you can’t be defeated, because Israelis will still tell you that they are surrounded by enemies who want to wipe them off the face of the earth. And, while Iran has given them plenty of reasons, both material and symbolic, to think that way, there are many other countries in the Middle East that have given them every reason not to think that way, but the attitude still holds that you have to show your military strength. Israel taking the initiative, taking matters into its own hands, and not waiting to be responsive is considered the best possible approach.

Who is he likely to run against?

His main competitors are various people from what Israelis view as the moderate right or center right. I just call it the anti-Netanyahu right, because it’s a right wing that includes people who, to Israelis, are more centrist and came out of the security establishment, like Gadi Eisenkot, the former chief of the general staff. He only formed his party recently, but he’s on the rise in the Israeli political system. He’s coming close in the polls to Naftali Bennett, a former Prime Minister, who started out to the right of Netanyahu. He was Prime Minister for about a year from mid-2021 to mid-2022. And, even though he comes from the far right and he himself represented religious-Jewish Israelis, now he’s seen as part of that anti-Netanyahu right, because of his criticism of the Prime Minister. But you can’t really call him center right because he represents much firmer right-wing positions. Then there are the leaders of medium-sized parties like Avigdor Lieberman, who’s also a stalwart secular right-winger, actually a Netanyahu protégé, who’s been the head of his own party since 1999.

But all of these people are in the same political camp. None of these figures have a clearly formed world view about how they would manage Israel’s geostrategic relations or the fact that Palestinians have been fighting for self-determination, and they don’t have any particular clear-eyed, fully developed world view or policy of what they would do on those issues, including with Iran. Everybody agrees that Iran is a terrible threat to Israel which backs nonstate militias that have attacked Israel militarily. And that Iran itself is a dangerous actor that destabilizes the Middle East and talks about threatening Israel and is definitely developing nuclear power beyond civilian use at some level and has a very advanced ballistic-missile program. And so all they say is that yes, of course, they support the war.

No Jewish politician is going to go against that public opinion, so they’re basically criticizing Netanyahu for not doing it better or for going into it without knowing how to achieve the goals. The most critical or somewhat oppositional viewpoint you can get is from Yair Golan, who’s the head of a party that Israelis view as left wing, which is called the Democrats. And he has said, Well, he should have translated the military and battlefield successes into diplomatic successes. But what those diplomatic successes might look like is unknown because he isn’t saying. It never gets to the stage of a properly developed world view that actually opposes what Netanyahu’s calling for.

We saw Trump intervene in the Hungarian election, trying to get his guy over the top. I imagine Trump is going to want Netanyahu to win later this year. To what degree is Netanyahu going to rely on Trump to win reëlection? And to what degree is Trump still popular in Israel?

We’re really still seeing the answer to that question evolve as we speak. Trump enjoyed absolutely dizzying levels of popularity with Israeli Jews going back to his first term, where he moved the Embassy to Jerusalem and recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights and came up with a peace plan that was very generous to Israel and not really much of a peace plan with relation to the Palestinians. So people loved him then. And they were wild about Trump when he essentially pressured Netanyahu into a ceasefire with Gaza that led to the release of more hostages in January, 2025.

So Trump was incredibly popular, wildly popular. And Netanyahu has depended on him since long before any of this. There were billboards towering over the highways in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv showing Netanyahu shaking Trump’s hand and saying that Netanyahu is in a different league on foreign relations than anybody else. He also had billboards made up with him and Narendra Modi, and him and Vladimir Putin, by the way. But he clearly depended on that wonderful adulation for Trump, but I don’t know where it’s going now.

And the reason I say that is because of what I consider to be pretty extraordinary levels of disappointment with the current ceasefire, which everybody knows was Trump’s initiative and essentially forced to some extent on Netanyahu. And I don’t know how that’s going to reverberate for Trump. I’ve been having inquiries from very shrewd longtime observers of Israeli politics asking me if Trump is going to eventually be a liability for Netanyahu. I think at this point that might be going too far, because, again, the starting point of Israeli support for Trump was so high but I can’t say with full confidence that Trump is going to be the trump card, so to speak, for Netanyahu to take the next election, especially because Netanyahu’s ratings are so stubbornly stuck where I mentioned before.

It certainly seems like Netanyahu has had mediocre polls before, and he has still managed to win election after election. How has he done so?

The polls were only really wrong in 2015. But remember that Israel has a very, very fragmented political system, a coalition-building system. No party has ever got a majority, and you generally have between four and eight parties in any given coalition to make that majority of sixty-one seats or more out of a hundred and twenty parliamentary seats. And Netanyahu is the most experienced and the savviest of all Israeli politicians at engineering different constellations of parties to help him get a majority, whether or not the parties of this original coalition can make sixty-one in the elections themselves.

And he does that through two mechanisms. One is that he sometimes manages to help reëngineer party constellations before the elections, by knowing which parties will maximize right-wing votes if they merge or break up. So there’s that possibility, of trying to reëngineer those parties or cajole the leaders into doing what he thinks is the right thing before the elections. And the other thing he’s very good at is getting parties to change their coalition options and loyalties after the elections. So he has three routes to winning. One is an outright win for the current coalition, which seems pretty unlikely right now, based on all credible polling for almost two years. But the other two options are certainly possible scenarios. Are they likely? Hard to say, but he has three different paths for him to win and an opposition that is very heavily fragmented, and doesn’t really like each other.

And a number of those opposition parties, including the ones we talked about before, have openly promised the Israeli public that they would never go into a coalition with parties representing Palestinian citizens of Israel. They’re really locking themselves into, frankly, a likely possibility that they won’t be able to form a coalition even if all the opposition parties together have sixty-five or seventy seats. If they’re not going to go into a coalition with Arab parties, it’s going to be much harder because very few polls give the Zionist opposition parties a majority of sixty-one out of a hundred and twenty.

When you think about the state of public opinion in Israel right now, does it seem like the country has been consistently moving to the right for the past twenty-five years? Or does it feel like October 7th was a real break that pushed things further right?

It is the first. People have been moving to the right in various ways and by various definitions since the collapse of the negotiations at Camp David and the second intifada. That was a major shift to the right, but then there is the much more significant shift to the right, and especially the populist right, by which I mean the political style we know about in the form of Trump being the most extreme version. Netanyahu is a very significant version of this, and was from 2009, when he came back into power. And that’s when you start to see, O.K., there was one sort of final last gasp at negotiations with the Palestinians, but we all knew that he didn’t ever want that to come to fruition.

And from that time on, the percentage of the Israeli population that defined themselves as right-wing started to accelerate. It was already moving to the right. But now it was also the populist right, in terms of attacks on democratic institutions in Israel and the rule of law, legitimating corruption, advancing legislation to undermine civil liberties and human rights, demonizing Palestinian citizens and left-wingers, demonizing the press and civil society—all those things fundamentally accelerated. And then, of course, the series of wars with Hamas and Gaza, where every war led Israelis to show less trust in the idea of negotiations, until there was practically nothing left to talk about because there were no negotiations. And support for the two-state solution, of course, was collapsing throughout this time.

There’s no question, just by the numbers alone, that October 7th meant the continuation of processes long under way. And the changes that we saw after October 7th were a matter of really very small degrees, and a continuation of that process. There was no U-turn at all on the part of Israeli society. This was absolutely consistent. Having said that, certain qualitative indicators became worse. We never heard about people talking about rebuilding settlements in Gaza or annexing Gaza until after October 7th. So the positions that “right wing” came to stand for became much more extreme. And there were times after October 7th when you had over fifty per cent of Israeli Jews who supported resettlement in Gaza, for example. But in terms of the general direction, it is absolutely continuity.♦

In the early-morning hours last Friday, a Molotov cocktail-style projectile hit a gate outside of the San Francisco mansion of Sam Altman, the founder and C.E.O. of OpenAI. Soon after, the suspected assailant, a twenty-year-old Texas man named Daniel Alejandro Moreno-Gama, was detained at OpenAI headquarters after allegedly threatening to burn the office down and kill anyone inside. According to a federal affidavit, Moreno-Gama had compiled a list with the names and addresses of other A.I. executives. Online, he left a trail of anti-A.I. writings. In a January post on Substack, he wrote that “the Intelligence race is likely to lead to human extinction.” Last year, in an anti-A.I. activist chat on Discord—where he supposedly goes by the name “Butlerian Jihadist,” referencing a fictional war against intelligent machines in “Dune”—he posted, “We are close to midnight it’s time to actually act.”

Moreno-Gama is apparently not the only one harboring such beliefs. Early Sunday morning, Altman’s home was attacked again, with a round of bullets fired from the street; a twenty-five-year-old and a twenty-three-year-old were later arrested for negligent discharge of weapons. And earlier this month a person fired a gun at the front door of Ron Gibson, an Indianapolis city councilman who had recently voted to approve rezoning that would allow the construction of a local data center to power A.I.; the perpetrator left a note that read “NO DATA CENTERS.” (As of this writing, none of those arrested have entered pleas.) These are all inexcusable and counterproductive acts of violence. They are also signs that the A.I. industry is inspiring extreme levels of hostility and mistrust.

On Friday evening, Altman wrote a post on his personal blog acknowledging the incident and included a photograph of his husband and child, appealing to a shared sense of humanity. He alluded to a recent “incendiary article,” presumably The New Yorker’s investigation, by my colleagues Andrew Marantz and Ronan Farrow, exposing Altman’s pattern of deceptive leadership at OpenAI. “We should de-escalate the rhetoric and tactics,” Altman wrote. What he failed to acknowledge is that much of the heightened, sometimes glibly apocalyptic rhetoric about the powers of A.I. has come from within the industry itself and, indeed, straight from his own mouth. (To quote just one indelible line, from 2015, “I think A.I. will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime there’ll be great companies created with serious machine learning.”) Even in his recent blog post, Altman wrote that “the fear and anxiety about AI is justified; we are in the process of witnessing the largest change to society in a long time, and perhaps ever.” Who, exactly, does he think is to blame for stoking hysteria? If you tell people often enough that your product is going to upend their way of life, take their jobs, and very possibly pose an existential threat to humanity, they just might start to believe you. A recent Gallup survey of Gen Z found that forty-two per cent of respondents felt “anxiety” about A.I. and thirty-one per cent felt “anger.”

The messaging behind A.I. companies has always relied on a self-serving paradox: the technology under development is so potentially dangerous that the public’s only choice is to put blind faith in the handful of opaque businesses rapidly developing it. (Or, as the Onion recently put it, “Sam Altman: ‘If I Don’t End the World, Someone Far More Dangerous Will.’ ”) It’s become increasingly clear that the corporate machinations of A.I. founders influence how our economy grows, how we fight wars, and how political messaging spreads, and that the founders expect to oversee A.I.’s societal transformations with only self-determined levels of transparency. The economics writer Noah Smith recently wondered whether A.I. executives might become “de facto emperors of the world.” This month, OpenAI released an industrial-policy plan that proclaims its intention to “keep people first” in the age of A.I. The document calls for sweeping systemic changes including a public wealth fund invested in the success of A.I.; a pivot toward the “care and connection economy” to bolster jobs, such as elder care, that are less likely to become outmoded by A.I.; and social benefits that are not tied to employers (presumably because employment itself will be a less sure bet once bots become truly “agentic”). The paper’s tone is patronizing at best, professing concern that the “economic gains” from A.I. could “concentrate within a small number of firms like OpenAI,” as if that isn’t exactly what is already happening by design.

There is a persistent delusion of grandeur among those leading the A.I. charge. In his blog post, Altman wrote, without apparent irony, that the prospect of controlling artificial general intelligence was like the “ring of power” from “The Lord of the Rings”: it “makes people do crazy things.” OpenAI’s main rival, Anthropic, has marketed itself as the industry’s safety-minded good guys. Its co-founder and C.E.O., Dario Amodei, originally left OpenAI owing to safety concerns, and he recently broke with the United States Department of Defense over the military’s use of A.I. in operating fully autonomous weapons, among other issues. But Anthropic, like OpenAI, is on the verge of an astronomical I.P.O., and it can be hard to disentangle the company’s marketing hype from its genuine safety concerns. Last week, Anthropic announced that its new model, Mythos, is too powerful to be released to the public and unveiled Project Glasswing, an effort to give certain companies and organizations, including Amazon, Cisco, JPMorgan Chase, and the U.S. government, early access to Mythos as a “head start” in preparing for the cybersecurity threats that the model poses. Early tests now being made public seem to justify Anthropic’s alarm: the AI Security Institute, a British government organization, found that Mythos could autonomously “execute multi-stage attacks on vulnerable networks” which would “take human professionals days of work.” The only way to fight the threats of A.I. is with more A.I., of course: Michael Cembalest, the chair of the Market and Investment Strategy group at JPMorgan, wrote, in a blog post about Project Glasswing, that Anthropic at times “feels like an arsonist selling fire extinguishers.”

Trusting Anthropic to hold back dangerous models seems somewhat dubious, given that Amodei expressed similar worries about Anthropic’s chatbot, Claude, only to release it after OpenAI put out ChatGPT. A.I. development has become a runaway corporate arms race in which caution is secondary to competition, with the two American giants battling not just each other but rapidly improving Chinese and open-source models as well. The A.I. industry is so far subject to none of the regulations that govern other dangerous technologies, such as firearms, pharmaceuticals, and environmental chemicals. The technology has evolved more quickly than the policy that governs it, in part because OpenAI has promoted its desire for regulation even as the company quietly works to quash it, including by supporting a proposed Illinois law to shield A.I. companies from liability. (In a similar way, social media has gone largely unregulated for two decades, owing to government negligence and industry lobbying.) Does anyone still believe that billionaire tech executives can be trusted as unelected stewards of the social good? The past decade should have disabused us of that notion many times over. We’ve watched Jeff Bezos acquire the Washington Post only to politicize and then gut it; Elon Musk destroy whatever claim Twitter had to being a neutral space of public discourse; Mark Zuckerberg knowingly promote platforms that harm young users’ mental health. OpenAI itself morphed from a pure nonprofit into one of the most valuable for-profit companies in the world, and yet here is Altman, still offering us advice on good governance like he works at an independent think tank.

Perhaps in response to the growing unease, A.I. companies have lately been undertaking various other efforts to appear more high-minded. Following the lead of Anthropic, Google DeepMind recently hired an in-house philosopher, and Anthropic convened a meeting of Christian leaders to discuss its chatbot’s moral orientation. A more effective strategy might be for A.I. executives to stop appointing themselves as the only arbiters of safety, to stop asking for blind faith, and to start fostering a system of external accountability, with input and involvement from the public. Tech companies proposing ways to reshape the government is a soft form of techno-fascism that alienates citizens; if A.I. requires a new social contract or a new political hierarchy, then its shape should not be up to the corporations to determine. There is another troubling paradox behind A.I. founders’ messaging: If the technology is as formidable as they claim, then they could be leading us toward existential disaster; if the technology proves less transformative, and thus less valuable than the hype suggests, then they are merely setting us up for global economic disaster. For those of us who aren’t self-appointed heroes of the artificial-intelligence movement, neither scenario is particularly appealing. ♦

In February, reports emerged that the operation to capture the Venezuelan President, Nicolás Maduro, had not been a strictly human affair. The extrajudicial caper had somehow involved Claude, Anthropic’s large language model. The military had recourse to Claude via a drop-down menu in a workflow package, the Maven Smart System, which gathers, synthesizes, and streamlines intelligence. The government procures M.S.S., as it is called, from Palantir, the sphinxlike defense-tech contractor co-founded by Peter Thiel and an eccentrically jingoistic philosopher named Alex Karp. Claude’s deployment seemed to come as something of a surprise to its parent company, and an Anthropic executive reportedly reached out to a Palantir counterpart to clarify what, exactly, Claude had done in Caracas. When this inquiry was relayed to the Trump Administration, one Administration official told me last month, it was interpreted as a signal that Anthropic, which was then renegotiating its own contract with the federal government, was perhaps a faithless partner. (Anthropic disputed that characterization of events.) This suspicion was confirmed when Anthropic, citing fears of domestic mass surveillance and autonomous weaponry, refused to allow the Pentagon “all lawful uses” of its products. This dispute culminated in the Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s designation, by outraged tweet, of Anthropic as a supply-chain risk—a standing peril to national security.

This ban, however, was not effective immediately. The Pentagon apparently needed Claude for one last job. Twelve hours later, the White House began to bomb Iran. Among the casualties of Operation Epic Fury’s first day were more than a hundred and seventy-five people, most of them little girls, at the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school, in the southern city of Minab. Claude’s potential culpability in this and other potential war crimes was a subject of widespread speculation, not only in the media but in Washington. Congressional Democrats sent a letter to Hegseth demanding a detailed account of how A.I. was being used in the Iran campaign. In an essay for his Substack that was republished, in slightly different form, by the Guardian, the technology scholar Kevin Baker wrote that almost none of the attendant coverage (including mine) “had any relationship to reality.” Maven had only recently added L.L.M.-based functionality, but the program had been around for a decade. Claude, in Baker’s view, was a MacGuffin. It only served to draw attention away from the centrality of Maven as an automated targeting system. He continued, “The real question, the question almost nobody was asking, is not about Claude or any language model. It is a bureaucratic question about what happened to the kill chain, and the answer is Palantir.”

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The veteran journalist Katrina Manson, who now covers defense tech for Bloomberg, spent much of the past few years asking precisely that question. Her new book, “Project Maven: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare,” is an unflaggingly well-reported and well-sourced account of the ongoing reconfiguration of the U.S. armed forces for a new technological era. The book was completed months before Anthropic’s redlines generated new interest in autonomous-drone swarms and killer robots, but even then the writing was on the wall. Dystopian carnage isn’t coming, she warns at the end of her introduction. It is “already here.”

“Project Maven” is structured as an intellectual and professional biography of Drew Cukor, a Marine Corps intelligence officer largely responsible for the eventual “success” of this military transformation. The narrative begins shortly after September 11th, when Cukor finds himself among the first troops on the ground in Afghanistan. His first mission, as part of an expeditionary unit sent to seize Kandahar Airport from the Taliban, finds him inside a blacked-out helicopter where the place of a lance corporal has been taken by a bulky P.C.—the paleolithic version of Claude en route to Venezuela. The computer was loaded with state-of-the-art tools to assist Cukor and his unit in target assessment, threat detection, mission planning, and commander briefings: “Excel, Word, Google Earth, and PowerPoint, and some in-house military software none of them liked.”

The problem, as Cukor saw it, was not that American forces lacked facts. They were drowning in intel about hideout caves, weapons stashes, and enemy movements, some of which was culled from surveillance or signals intelligence and some of which came from detainee interrogations. But the Marines had no way to put it all together. Al Qaeda targets were listed in Excel. PowerPoint was for mapping network connections. Word was for writing things up. Google Earth was for zooming in and out. This wasn’t wholly ineffective—as one artillery officer later told Manson, “We’ve killed more people on Office than you’d ever imagine”—but precision munitions were only precise if you knew precisely where to point them. Cukor had no methodical way to “divine the patterns of war.” Over the ensuing decade, he watched soldiers and civilians die over and over because of a lack of organized, integrated information. The military, he’d long thought, required “something ‘vastly different’ from the status quo”: he dreamed of a “single digital grid” that gave a “highly accurate battlespace picture” in real time, a vision of white dots that moved legibly across an “aspirational single pane of glass to clear up the fog of war.”

The realization of this digital pane, which ultimately manifested itself as Project Maven, is one of two stories that Manson tells. It describes the halting development of the substance of what Cukor wanted. In parallel, she recounts the procedural, against-all-odds-ish story of how he went about achieving it. This is the story of Cukor’s private war against a stodgy Pentagon bureaucracy. Cukor, as she portrays him, is a cartoonishly gruff, ball-breaking pain in the ass who overworks himself and mistreats his subordinates and alienates his superiors. He patterns himself after Hyman Rickover, the notoriously bullheaded admiral who single-handedly called into being the Navy’s nuclear-submarine fleet. At the same time, he’s something of an intellectual romantic: his favorite novel, Manson discovers, is “Don Quixote,” which provides her with a ready-made narrative template in which a “tragicomic and misunderstood hero pursues a doomed quest for an idealized version of the world that does not exist, forever trying and failing to save the world and right wrongs.”

Manson, despite herself and to her credit, clearly comes to like Cukor, or at least begrudgingly admire him. Her personal sympathy clears the space for her to take seriously his passion for a world made better and safer by A.I. warfare. In this alternate future, flesh-and-blood soldiers are replaced by drones and robots (and, much later, militarized unmanned Jet Skis); the lives of innocent civilians are spared by reliable systems with instantaneous and total information awareness; and A.I. superiority provides an even more effective deterrent than nuclear capabilities. Manson points out that there are precedents for this fantasy of war’s obsolescence: in the years before the First World War, one contemporaneous observer wondered if the mass-produced rifle would lead to such unfathomable carnage that no commander in his right mind would be willing to risk combat.

But Cukor insists that Maven was never supposed to be a weapon. He frequently defends the project as nothing more than an integrated data platform, which will afford its human users a dramatically increased capacity to make wise and careful decisions. With this positive vision in mind, Manson makes it at least intermittently possible to root for Cukor—as one roots for the insouciant Maverick in the “Top Gun” films—as he struggles with computer-vision models that don’t work, colleagues who jealously hoard their data, users who prefer the systems they know, a top brass set in its old kludgy ways, and peacenik tech workers. In 2018, Google employees staged a massive walkout to protest the company’s work on a primitive iteration of the project.

In the aftermath of the Google fiasco, Cukor turns to Palantir (in addition to Microsoft and Amazon) to make Maven a reality. The contract, Manson notes, almost certainly rescued an otherwise ailing Palantir from corporate oblivion. It also may have rescued Maven, which ultimately overcame the bitter skepticism of the defense establishment. Manson’s story culminates with the war in Ukraine, in which Maven has helped mitigate Russia’s advantages; the conflict became an inflection point for comprehensive national adoption. The Pentagon’s current contract ceiling for Maven is $1.3 billion. Former Mavenites have assumed positions of great power and influence in both the Trump Administration and a closely allied faction of the tech sector, which grew bored with mindless consumer apps in favor of a muscular military-industrial complex. Our allies, too, have been convinced: NATO now has its own Maven contract with Palantir, and that prompted ten member nations to pursue one, too. At any given time, thousands of people are logged in, monitoring thousands of information flows distilled into a clean user interface that recalls the cinematic touchscreens of “Minority Report.”

The Maven Smart System has become a global surveillance apparatus—it can keep track of forty-nine thousand airfields all over the world—but its current work is hardly limited to intelligence provision and analysis. A “single click,” Manson reports, “could send coordinates through a tactical data link to a specific weapons platform so that it could fire at the target.” The entire process, from target identification to target destruction, is four clicks. In 2023, one source told her that he could sign off on eighty targets in an hour: “Accept. Accept. Accept.” The old system could hit fewer than a hundred targets a day; the new system can hit a thousand, and with the recent integration of L.L.M.s that number has risen to five thousand. It was crucial in the “precision” mass-bombing in Iran. Officials told Manson that Maven was “accelerating operations and ‘enabling lethality’ at combat headquarters around the world.” It is also, predictably, being repurposed for border control and drug policing at home.

And Maven is only one part of the A.I. tool kit. Manson uncovers evidence of two clandestine killer-robot programs, one aerial and the other aquatic, which are being developed in haste. Should China make a move against Taiwan, the straits between them will resemble, as one U.S. commander had it, a “hellscape” of armed automata. For the first time, the Pentagon’s proposed budget contained a line item for comprehensively self-directing systems, requesting an allocation of more than thirteen billion dollars. A machine can shoot, Manson reports, up to “ten times faster than an assassin.” This gives the “autonomy hawks” something like an erotic frisson: one source says that “there’s really nothing quite like seeing a machine aim,” explaining their sense of “an alien aspect, some otherworld[ly] feeling, I don’t want to say ‘religious,’ that’s not the right word.”

But Cukor, who hit his thirty-year up-or-out deadline without getting a star, had long since been removed to lucrative work in the private sector. Manson catches up with him at the beach, near his home in Los Angeles. “He always foresaw a union between human and machine, not a machine takeover,” she writes. He’d once told her that the problem with war was that humans are “materially corrupt, inefficient, and they get tired.” Their weaknesses could be balanced with machine strengths. “ ‘If you get these things tuned up the right way, they can perform better than humans,’ he insisted. AI might help assail the inevitable problem: ‘War is fraught with human error.’ ”

“So was America,” she writes. “We’re flawed,” he says.

Cukor, too, is flawed. He might prefer to believe that Maven was only ever supposed to provide reliable intelligence to inform human decision-making, but Manson repeatedly points out that this was always somewhere between wishful thinking and deliberate obfuscation. Cukor’s interest in operations was such an open secret that it scarcely counted as a secret. Alex Karp, the C.E.O. of Palantir, once described him as the “founding father of A.I. targeting.”

In an important sense, neither Project Maven nor the book that it inspired was ever about A.I. per se Cukor may have been the crew-cutted colonel who bulldozed the project into existence, but he wasn’t the one who set it in motion. In 2014, halfway through the second Obama Administration, the Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, and his deputy, Robert Work, proposed what they called the “third offset strategy.” An “offset,” as Kevin Baker, the technology scholar, describes it, “is a bet that a technological advantage can compensate for a strategic weakness the country cannot fix directly.” The first offset was the development of nuclear weapons, which secured American dominance over a Soviet Union that could rely on mass mobilization. When the Soviets developed their own atomic bombs, the U.S. staked its superiority on precision munitions, like long-range guided missiles, and stealth technology.

The “third offset,” once Russia and now China had caught up, had less to do with a particular technology than with the effort to revamp the military for sheer speed and agility. What we now call “A.I.” was, at the time, still an obscure cat-identification device. Autonomy was nevertheless a bedrock component. At a public gathering in 2015, Work said, “I’m telling you right now, ten years from now if the first person through a breach isn’t a fricking robot, shame on us.” As he put it to Manson, “I do not want it to just be about intelligence” but about “some type of direct warfighting applications.” Cukor pitched Work on a demo to prove that drone feeds could be better monitored by algorithms than distractible airmen; according to one of Manson’s sources, Work was “super psyched,” and dispatched him to Silicon Valley. Cukor visited Tesla, Waymo, and Uber.

In the spring of 2017, Work inaugurated the secretive Project Maven and appointed Cukor its chief. Their work was only ever couched as an intelligence program, not a munitions or weapons platform. When Manson asked an early Mavenite if targeting and offensive strikes were an unspoken component, he said, “Yah, of course. It’s not like we’re doing it for kicks. The goal of the intel is to take out high-value targets.” Manson continues, “Speaking to me years later, Cukor made no bones about it either.” What was the point of all this speed if you needed to wait for cumbersome human supervision? If the machines could identify the targets, couldn’t they also pull the trigger to rain death from all angles?

From this perspective, Cukor wasn’t exactly waging a war on a definitionally bad thing called bureaucracy. What he identified as sclerosis might more properly have been described as the deliberative process by which our rashest impulses were kept in check. One could certainly “optimize” the decision-making apparatus by ridding it of any opportunities for individuals or committees to exercise discretion. But, Kevin Baker writes, this “friction is also where judgment forms. Clausewitz observed that most intelligence is false, that reports contradict each other. The commander who has worked through this learns to see the way an eye adjusts to darkness, not by getting better light but by staying long enough to use what light there is.” He continues, “This ‘staying’ is what takes time. Compress the time and the friction does not disappear. You just stop noticing it.” Humans are in the loop for a reason. We are there to slow things down.

Manson can’t quite make up her mind about the value proposition of institutional inertia. When she’s in a credulous mood, and disposed to accept Cukor’s appeal to A.I. warfare as an enhancement that will save precious lives, bureaucracy is like an old brick wall for Cukor to bust through like the Kool-Aid Man. When she instead assesses Cukor as a squirrelly pitchman and an all-around bad-faith actor, bureaucratic regulation looks more like Chesterton’s fence—something you don’t demolish unless you know precisely why someone put it there in the first place. Baker, for his part, sees no real distinction between the starchy, old-school Pentagon and its new A.I.-disrupted iteration. They are rather points along a continuum of increasing proceduralism, structures designed to limit the scope of independent action and accountability. Cukor and his ilk might think they’re furnishing service members with new means to rise to the occasion, but what they’re really doing is usurping human flexibility and freedom: “Karp thinks he is destroying bureaucracy,” Baker writes. “He is encoding it.” With Maven, he continues, “what Karp eliminated was the discretion the institution could never admit it depended on. What remains is a bureaucracy that can execute its rules but with no one left to interpret them. Bureaucracy encoded in software does not bend. It shatters.”

One argument in favor of the machines tends to pit the omniscience, mathematical rationality, and tirelessness of A.I. at its best against the weakness, hypocrisy, delusion, and bias of humans at their worst. The flip case of this line of thinking pits the best of humanity—situations in which humble, reflective, and wise people model meaningful discretion—against the worst of A.I.’s routinized brutishness. Neither of these is particularly satisfying, but then again this is just another version of the dilemma that the German sociologist Max Weber pointed out more than a century ago: legalistic bureaucracies, in which everyone follows the same rules for the same reasons, seem like the fairest and most even-handed way to arrange a collective in pursuit of shared values and goals. They might, in fact, be the only way to do so. But insuring that everyone hews to a common procedure is never going to help us hash out what our values and goals ought to be in the first place. Bureaucracies are efficient, but they cannot determine what ends our efficiency ought to serve. Baker has a point when he says that comprehensive automation is the final consolidation of the bureaucratic spirit. But that doesn’t mean we have no choice.

Neither Manson nor Baker, understandably, seems to have much patience with this argument. The A.I. boosters—especially in warfare, but in general—use it cynically, to evade responsibility: we are in the simple business of fulfilling objectives, they proclaim, and if you don’t like those objectives you’re free to take it up with policymakers. We build the tools; it’s up to all of us to decide to use them wisely. Setting aside the fact that these same people have done everything within their power to stifle regulation, this is self-evidently true. It’s also not much consolation. It seems absurd to expect prudence and restraint from figures like Pete Hegseth, who has written, of the Geneva Conventions, “Our boys should not fight by rules written by dignified men in mahogany rooms eighty years ago.”

At the end of the book, Manson tells Cukor that when all is said and done she just doesn’t buy the idea that A.I. will ever be contained by cautious oversight. In the context of an exchange about Israel’s reliance on near-indiscriminate A.I.-enabled killing in Gaza, she says that “the AI targeting machine makes possible the policy decision, enabling operational speed and volume.” Cukor, who has made the policy argument in the past, now concedes: “This is correct.” Still, he affirms, “I’d do it again, in the same way.” ♦